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Keyword text block on homepage - keep or do away with?

One of my sites is getting a major refresh on the home page, which is good and bad.

The legacy homepage was very long, and had a lot of text (thousands+ of words) in the body, with about 450+ links (internal/external) on the page. A ton of graphics, etc etc. Yuck.

The revamped homepage is much improved. Very short, visual, fast, and SEO optimized. It's more of launching pad into the rest of the site. But, the text in the body is much less, perhaps a 100 words or so.

The worry is that with so little text, matching the target kw count will appear as stuffing. The 'solution' was to include a visible text box at the bottom of the page, with about 300 words, basically what would typically appear in an 'about' section of a site. But instead, its located on the bottom of the homepage to beef up the pages content, and to avoid looking too 'stuffed'.

Visually, its unattractive IMHO and while the text is good and informative, its under the fold and will likely not change that much going forward. This all seems very 10 years ago to me, but I'd like a second opinion.

5 Responses

The legacy homepage was very long, and had a lot of text (thousands+ of words) in the body, with about 450+ links (internal/external) on the page. A ton of graphics, etc etc.

This sounds like the homepage of my site... I started out with a small homepage like you describe and then added a little more to it and visitor engagement went up.... added a little more and visitor engagement went up... added more and visitor engagement went up....

Now my homepage looks like the latimes.com. The actions of my visitors are hard to argue with.

Tough one. While I do see the value of having some added text, it also seems very 'engine targeted' rather than 'user targeted'. Is there any value in this for the users? If there isn't, could you try to improve the text so that it is? If the sole purpose of this text is to please the engines, I might consider getting rid of it, otherwise it is a nice sub-fold semi-useful piece of text for both users and engines and I would keep it.

Ask yourself this - is Google traffic of utmost importance or does user experience what matters most?

Its a vicious cycle.. if you "over optimize" your website, you may initially rank higher but will become less "linkable" to other resources. Also, it may get stunted or even bowled over by competition who converts much better than you.

I always go for user experience first unless my site couldn't live without organic traffic

Google wants the best user experience. They have billions of dollars riding on providing the best user experience. The challenge is that sometimes webmasters believe their judgement on the best user experience is better then Google's.

I would suggest that whenever there is a conflict between what you feel would be the best user experience and what Google rewards, do serious research on the subject. Could Google be wrong? Absolutely. It is more likely that the webmaster or SEO might be mistaken.

EGOL's suggestion is perfect. He continuously modified his site over time to ensure the best user experience. In the end he wound up with a home page design that wasn't what he expected, but that user's love. The result is a great user experience AND great results from Google.

As I mentioned, if you go overboard with "optimizing" you end up having a site that is not linkable or attractive enough for other people to link to you naturally, so although you will get traffic for using the keyword rich content, title, etc, you are getting it at the cost of future links. That's lacking a long term strategy.I would never link to a website that looked too keywordy or spammy even if it wasn't one and I am confident there are many others like me.

That being said - if you have smaller "satellite" sites, and those sites are meant to cater to a specific niche and their main objective is to get traffic to your main website rather than create new leads/sales on their own, then its a different story - I would go for optimizing first in this case. I would make sure most keywords that I care for are covered. User experience is still important (or they'll bounce) but not as much as it is for your main MOTHER site.

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